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How To List FOSS Experience On Your Resume
maximus1 writes "If you're selling skills gained in an open source project, you have additional opportunities to shine, say experts in this ITWorld article. But what is the best way to explain your FOSS experience? 'Someone stands out because of how they talk about the project, says Zack Grossbart, author of The One Minute Commute. His advice is to describe the project and discuss your contributions in detail: 'If you were a committer, what did you do to earn that status? What features did you work on? Did you design new areas, or just implement predefined functions? Did you lead meetings? Define new architecture? Set the project direction?' If the FOSS experience is part of your background but not a shining beacon or job equivalent, it's common to list it under 'other experience.' Andy Lester, author of Land The Tech Job You Love, says: 'Think of each project as a freelance job that you've worked on. Just as different freelance gigs have varying sizes and scopes, so too does each project to which you contribute. The key is to not lump all your projects under one "open source work" heading.' Good examples are worth a thousand words. Grossbart offers up his resume as a sound but not perfect example (PDF) that includes open source experience. (His article on how to format your resume might also be of interest.)"
Why not just show them what you did?
step 1: get your resume posted on /. front page
step 2: ???
step 3: PROFIT !!!
> Did you lead meetings?
What are these "meetings" you speak of?
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
except that that resume looks like crap. He spends all this time worrying about serifs and ligatures, when as a whole it's nearly illegible. It's all crowded into the page in what seems to the eye like one big chunk of prose. It hurts my eyes just trying to read the text. There are places for bullets - and lists of things is a good place for them. A separating space or line here or there isn't going to kill anyone. Also, it's not a sin to use two pages so that you don't have to pack everything in.
Is not "worry about the content, not the presentation" the mantra around here? If we are supposed to follow that for the web-pages we produce, why should the resumes be different?
One's resume should be in XML, from which various other formats can be produced automatically (and consistently)...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Make a portfolio of open source work you've done. Go in and extract code that you've written. Annotate it explaining what problem you were solving and why you chose the design you did, etc. Keep each section fairly short (a few hundred lines of code) and write an overall document linking up the various code excerpts, creating a narrative for them to follow. If you have planning/design documentation, etc feel free to show excerpts of that too. Even emails from mailing lists where you defused a potentially difficult situation is good. Finally, provide links to all the original projects that you've contributed to so they can see your contribution first hand.
After you have organized all that, put it up on a web page somewhere and put a link on your resume. Burn a few business card sized CDs and hand them out at interviews. Make sure to bring a few to each interview. I've found they are popular.
This has gotten me more than one job. I used to maintain my portfolio continuously on my web page, but I'm teaching now and have let it lapse. However, it's sometimes useful even outside the job searching venue.
Anyone worth working for will be able to compose the document in their head.
Depends which jobs you are applying for, but if you aren't going into a super technology-based field (such as if you are applying to be a sysadmin at a local business, not applying for Google, MS or IBM) use big recognizable names. Even if you only submitted a small patch for the Linux kernel, saying that you have developed part of the Linux kernel might just be what is needed on your resume. Other large projects such as Firefox, Open Office, and other things that the people in HR recognize might just make them think you are great at your job even if its only tiny patches you submitted.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Press "enter" after one of your job bulletpoints to make a new list items. Type in your role on the project, the name of the project, then the dates during which you worked on it. Provide a short description of the work you did, and how it impacted the success of the project.
Done.
Comment of the year
opinion? Blah blah blah, try 30 different fonts. Blah blah blah, try 20 different text editors. And HR will still want a copy in word format or plain text format, ignore any formatting, and keyword scan.
My resume is done in latex. Better font, better justification, better appearance.
Listing FOSS contributions outside of Other Experience can look like stretching, and is stretching unless it's either something you're spending, say, 20+ hours/week on, or you're applying for your first position out of school. If you're not, it's not really the kind of professional experience you want to showcase, is it?
Even if you're spending substantial time on a FOSS project, you still may not want to list it outside of Other Experience other than to explain what you have been doing in the time since your most recent employment.
What you don't want to do is give the impression that you're trying to cover up for being under-qualified, for lacking in professional experience, or that you're not employable in a traditional position.
You are forced to put the GNU notice in your resume and provide a blood sample in a test tube so they can sequence your ADN.
1. only list relevant experience, if your applying for a DBA position i don't want to waste time reading about how you enjoy cake decorating.
2. put the good stuff first, i need to skim 100's of these resumes so having to read till page 10 isn't helping your chances that'll see your skills.
3. keep the format clean and easy to read, don't make my eye's bleed because your going in the bin after page one with pink curly fonts.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Why would FOSS or volunteer work be any different than work you did for a pay check?
It goes on the Resume same as any other job. I treat them with the exactly the same.
I read about data miners and other such rubbish filtering out FOSS and such type work. Well that is complete and total non-sense. Your resume is a record of your experience and accomplishments plain and simple.
Hear is some advice.
DO NOT MAKE YOUR RESUME OVERLY COMPLICATED. You do not need 20 headings highlighting the different views of your career. K.I.S.S. Keep It Simple Stupid is the rule to follow. Spend your effort on making sure that each piece of experience is effectively presented through a well written resume.
I use this rule of thumb. I treat my resume/CV as a full time job for 1 week. I spend no less than 40 hours working on it before any potential employer will see it. That's nto for every employer. That's for each time I'm on the job market. In North America no more than 4 pages EVER. In other parts of the world they like to see as much as a page per year experience ( I know ridiculous ). So what if the agency filters it and puts into their format. Let them. You're bring fresh copies on PLAIN WHITE PAPER in B/W to the interview? Cause you should be slapped if you don't. Oh gee all of a sudden your resume stands out in the pile of identical resumes in the stack. Why? Because it is well formatted on quality WHITE paper.
I read a lot of resumes. A LOT. I toss almost all of the resumes that have pictures / fancy paper / more heft than a phone book into the bin before turning the first page.
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Do NOT's
- Put your picture on the resume. You are not that good looking.
- Use colored paper. What are you 12?
- Use textured paper. Again are you 12?
- Use multiple fonts. Only use Helvetica. Why all printers have it and it looks clean and is easy to read.
- Leave half empty pages. All pages should have a solid balance of text. Half pages are tossed pages.
- Only use one recruiter. Where is there a law that states you can only use one recruiter?
- Forget to shave. Guys Gals, it applies to both of you. Clean looks get the jobs and more money. Don't care if it's racist / prejudice or what ever complaint you have. Clean looks always win. Grow the pRon mustache after you get the job OK.
Subject pretty much says it all. Sometimes the humans you need to communicate with will all be on your level. Sometimes they won't. Depending on the job and the company culture, you may or may not need to change your approach - but in every case, you need to carefully consider your audience.
You are so right... except for the font. Humans read a serif font about 20% faster and with less errors than a sans serif font so use Times instead of Helvetica (which btw. is not available on a std.Windows PC... Arial, Tahoma or Verdana are not good substitutes for Helvetica).
...if you have what would be termed an "unconventional" appearance by more narrow minded employers, consider the kind of companies which are more likely to hire you.
I have long hair, facial hair and tattoos. I recently took a temp contract with a publishing company. They didn't have a "dress code" as such and the atmosphere was pretty relaxed. A few weeks later they asked if I'd run the department. Plenty of businesses operate under similar conditions, and unlike places which mandate a particular look, they tend not to treat employees like shit.
Will you alienate some employers by not having a short back and sides and a clean shave? Yes.
Are they worth working for? Not in my opinion.
Whether a project you worked on was open source or not is of no great importance. Treat it as you would any work experience: emphasize the skills used and learned, technically and socially, the tools, environment, and technologies you worked with.. You don't want to look like a commie zealot, anyway, so don't rant about FOSS on your résumé.
Aside form the "like a job" experience, the best selling point of voluntary FOSS involvement is that it shows you like your work.
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
do not mention any FOSS activities to anybody! i mean it! also try making money with something that pays, like e.g. drug dealing or gun slinging, so that you have enough money and time to develop real cool free software. you could also sneak plutonium into iran or ask The Melvins if they need a new roadie...
Sorry, but this is not the right tool to list FOSS experience. Next!
I think he didn't list his FOSS experience very well. It says:
Sole engineer for the GoTD program (http://sourceforge.net/projects/mgatdirector), an open source program for directing Go tournaments. GoTD integrates registration, player pairing, handicapping,
conict resolution, and results reporting into one easy-to-use interface. GoTD is the rst and only open source program available for managing Go tournaments.
It sounds like he is selling the project, not himself. In my experience, you don't say what the project did, you say the technologies it uses and what YOU did. I might write:
Sole engineer for the GoTD program (http://sourceforge.net/projects/mgatdirector), an open source program for directing Go tournaments written in C++/Qt. Ran on Linux, Windows, and Commodore 64. Maintained project in source control via sourceforge. Prioritized bug reports, applied fixes, and determined new features. A forum was established to solicit feedback from customers.
I think most hiring managers will read past the first page... assuming that they didn't get 100 resumes in response to a single job ad. But in a lot of companies, HR people exist to eliminate candidates more than they work to find the right ones. So they perform a kind of triage, looking for the reasons to dump your resume immediately (which I wrote about at Javaworld in How to Make HR Dump A Programmer's Resume and they are attracted by some strangely shiny things like keywords What HR Professionals Look For in a Programmer's Resume).
Mostly, the idea is to get past the HR department and get to the hiring manager -- the person to whom you'd report, ideally. But if she has a stack of 100 resumes to fill an open position, you need to capture her attention immediately and shout I have the background you need. That's among the reasons that it's a good idea to include FOSS experience, which is what I wrote in the first part of that blog post.
Most tech cvs/resumes i have seen list the various projects worked on in the career history section. If you wanted to include open source projects that don't relate to a specific job then you could have a cut down career history section with just an explanation of each job and then split out the projects into a seperate section. You could then just put a reference with each project to say which job or open source project it related to. That way your commercial work and open source work get equal precedence and you don't have to relegate your open source projects to their own little ghetto.
To answer the main question, say what you did. If it's minor (like mine), just put it under "other experience." If your resume makes it up past HR to a techie, he will notice it. Unlike HR most technically-competent interviewers have fewer resumes to process and are detail-oriented. Most have asked about my OSS experience even though its only a couple of sentences under "other experience". OSS experience rarely counts for anything to a HR person, unless they are specifically looking for an OSS package or technology.
Zack's resume fails in certain regards:
- too damn squeezed
- bullet points and keywords
- what are your achievements? Quantify them
- keyword spam like "technical skills" belong at the end. on a second page if necessary (only bots and crawlers go there. humans from HR stop at the first page)
- "references available" and your snail mail address are redundant and should be reserved for when you have space to spare
- with >10 years of experience, you deserve a second page. But do prepare a short 1-pager for the HR drones.
The serif/sans serif font readability is a function of whether the reader learned to read with a serif font or with a sans serif font. Most early readers are in a serif font. However, if you were in speech therapy before you could read, you might have taught yourself to read from sans-serif flash cards.
Of course, when I encounter a resume in 12pt helvetica, I immediately write it off as being from someone that cannot figure out how to change fonts in Macwrite.